Python pandas an efficient way to see which column contains a value and use its coordinates as an offset

Abstraction: Searching a pandas DataFrame for a specific cell value by position

Key points:

• Use case: locate a cell containing a known label (e.g., "date") in an unknown row/column and return the adjacent cell value
• Practical when DataFrame is reshaped from a messy spreadsheet and value positions vary across files
• Requires searching across both rows and columns since position is not fixed
• Demonstrates DataFrame indexing patterns for irregular/semi-structured tabular data
• Stack Overflow Q&A from 2013 illustrating common pandas data-wrangling challenge

Connections: Pandas · Stackoverflow · Data Manipulation · Python Data Analysis

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16755780/python-pandas-an-efficient-way-to-see-which-column-contains-a-value-and-use-its